OTHER COMMENTARIES
NEWS
by Al Jazeera – TRANSCEND Media Service 23 Jan 2012 – Millions across Asia celebrate the Chinese New Year, with superstitious anticipating a year filled with luck. A billion-plus Asians have welcomed the Year of the Dragon with a cacophony of fireworks, hoping the mightiest sign in the Chinese zodiac will usher in the wealth and power it represents.
SPOTLIGHT
by Michael Hastings – Rolling Stone Under house arrest in England, the WikiLeaks founder opens up about his battle with the ‘Times,’ his stint in solitary and the future of journalism. It’s a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside.
by Chase Madar – TomDispatch Who in their right mind wants to talk about, think about, or read a short essay about… civilian war casualties? What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan, Iraq, and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.
IN FOCUS
by Pepe Escobar - TomDispatch So Iran may be “isolated” from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side. And then, of course, there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran’s Central Bank. No wonder, because these unilateral U.S. sanctions are also aimed at Asia. After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, together, buy no less than 62% of Iran’s oil exports.
by Ashley Smith – Socialist Worker “Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” Such claims are a lie. Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.
BY TRANSCEND MEMBERS
by Richard Falk – TRANSCEND Media Service To be objective commentators we must ask ourselves whether Iran’s posture toward its nuclear program is unreasonable under these circumstances. When was the last time [Iran] resorted to force against a hostile neighbor? The surprising answer is over 200 years ago! Can either of Iran’s antagonists claim a comparable record of living within its borders? Why does Iran not have the same right as other states to take full advantage of nuclear technology?
by Dr. Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service Why the media coverage and expert yukings on Burma are so fundamentally non-sense. Firstly, the greatest misperception and flaw in the current media coverage about Burma’s changes is talking about these reforms as if it were the works of President Thein Sein. Like the Chinese Communist Party or the former USSR’s CCCP, the Burmese regime in power is a collective leadership with one big guy in the back.
by Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service The despair is necessarily both planet-wide and highly personal (Implication of Personal Despair in Planetary Despair, 2010). The condition can be described as a form of cognitive “ground zero” — a sense of pointlessness notably articulated through recognition that the future offers “nothing”, especially for those reduced to “nothing” by a combination of factors, as separately discussed (Reintegration of a Remaindered World, 2011; Way Round Cognitive Ground Zero and Pointlessness, 2012).
by Uri Avnery – TRANSCEND Media Service “Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic policy,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. This has probably been more or less true of every country since the advent of democracy. Yet in Israel, this seems even truer. (Ironically, it could almost be said that the US has no foreign policy, only an Israeli domestic policy.)
NONVIOLENCE
by Mary Elizabeth King – Waging Nonviolence In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence.
BRICS
by Gabriel Elizondo – Al Jazeera About 24,000 people will be displaced from towns in the Amazon to make way for the world’s third biggest dam. Five thousand men are working in two shifts, from 7 am until 5 pm and from 5 pm until 2:30 am, six days a week. The construction area is gigantic, to form two reservoirs 500 square kilometres in size. A ‘small city’ is being built inside the work area to accommodate some of the 20,000 labourers and engineers who will be working here by November 2013. When completed, Belo Monte will be the world’s third largest hydroelectric dam and the latest cost estimate is $14bn.
EUROPE
by René Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service The Right Wing-Populist policies of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, symbolized by dropping the term ‘Republic’ from the name of the country, has created a constitutional crisis within the European Union (EU).
by Les Leopold - AlterNet If Goldman Sachs is a vampire squid, as Matt Taibbi so aptly named it, then hedge funds are like schools of piranhas or sharks, eager to strip the financial carcass to the bone. The sharks at this very moment are circling Greece, waiting to devour that nation’s resources. To understand this attack we need to enter into the rotting innards of our financial system. But aren’t the Greeks lazy? Let’s starts with a closer look at why Greece has accumulated so much debt.
by Jonah Hull – Al Jazeera The darling of human-rights groups – and victims – in Spain and around the world, Balthasar Garzon stepped on many toes in his long career. Members of both the ruling Popular Party and the previous Socialist government resent indictments handed down implicating officials in corruption and state-sponsored death squads. He’s no friend of extant elements of old regimes in Latin America, where amnesties for war crimes have successively been tested and repealed in Guatemala and Argentina after Garzon’s indictment of Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet in the late 1990s.
LATIN AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN
by Jayati Ghosh – The Guardian Ecuador must be one of the most exciting places on Earth right now, in terms of working towards a new development paradigm. It shows how much can be achieved with political will, even in uncertain economic times. Just 10 years ago, Ecuador was more or less a basket case, a quintessential “banana republic” (it happens to be the world’s largest exporter of bananas), characterised by political instability, inequality, a poorly-performing economy, and the ever-looming impact of the US on its domestic politics.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
by Alan Hart – TRANSCEND Media Service When is a terrorist not a terrorist in the eyes of the Obama administration (not to mention all of its predecessors) and the governments of the Western world? Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset. In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs.
THE UNITED NATIONS
by Thalif Deen – Inter Press Service-IPS When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announces his new team of senior officials shortly, his appointments will be based not only on merit but also on demands made by the five big powers – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – as well as key donors who sustain U.N. agencies through voluntary contributions.
by Rene Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service The United Nations General Assembly in Resolution A/RES/64/136 has designated 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives in order to highlight the large role that cooperatives can play in ecologically-sound development and poverty reduction.
MEDIA
by Amy Goodman – Truthdig Wednesday, Jan. 18 [2012], marked the largest online protest in the history of the Internet. Websites from large to small “went dark” in protest of proposed legislation before the U.S. House and Senate that could profoundly change the Internet.
by Mac Slavo, shtfplan – TRANSCEND Media Service We aren’t one bit convinced that this veto was done in the interests of free expression, as the administration may claim. In November, the President issued a similar veto threat about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). He flip-flopped on the issue just a couple of weeks later, and signed the bill into law over New Year’s weekend to complete silence from the mainstream media. It is our view that SOPA, in one form or another, will return with a vengeance.
by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Alicia Solow-Niederman – Future of the Internet This document is a guide to the Stop Online Piracy Act as proposed in the United States House of Representatives. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, 112th Cong. (2011). It represents our notes as we sought to understand exactly what it does and how it does it — along with our corresponding sense for why its principal mechanisms make for poor law. Our aim is for this analysis to be useful to anyone wanting to understand the Act — whatever his or her point of view may be on technology or intellectual property policy.
by Cyril Mychalejkon- Upside Down World While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.
ENVIRONMENT
by Claire Thompson – Grist Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen.
by Daniel Mittler, Greenpeace – TRANSCEND Media Service The lack of spine is clearest in the last paragraph which calls for voluntary commitments announced at Rio to be stapled together in a “registry/compendium that will serve as an accountability framework.” In other words, there will be no enforcement or control. Your word will be taken at face value and the “accountability framework” will be the act of stapling all voluntary commitments together in one document. An invitation to greenwash, if there ever was one.
by Kristen Saloomey – Al Jazeera Seismologists from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources-ODNR asked to study the quakes had already gone on record saying they were directly linked to one well in particular. “I think this case has reached point of being proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” John Armbruster told me when I visited him at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
by Peter Kahare – Inter Press Service-IPS Several years ago, Lakes Kamnarok and Ol Bollosat in Kenya were vibrant water bodies that supported and shaped the ecosystems around them. But today they are shells of their former selves, due to heavy siltation caused by human activities.
by Washington's Blog – TRANSCEND Media Service California, Finland, Canada, Australia Hit by Radiation
GENETIC ENGINEERING
by Sayer Ji, OpEdNews – TRANSCEND Media Service In an unprecedented decision, India’s National Biodiversity Authority(NBA), a government agency, declared legal action against Monsanto (and their collaborators) for accessing and using local eggplant varieties (known as brinjal) to develop their Bt genetically engineered version without prior approval of the competent authorities, which is considered an act of “biopiracy.”
ECONOMICS
by Mira Tekelova, Positive Money – TRANSCEND Media Service Now, it is abundantly clear from this that the IMF and the World Bank are not just lending money; they are involved in creating it. Although Special Drawing Rights, SDRs, are described as amounts ‘credited’ to a nation, no money or credit of any kind is put into nations accounts. SDRs are actually a credit facility, just like a bank overdraft – if they are borrowed, they must be repaid. The IMF and the World Bank are all in a system of sustaining the unsustainable. Until we recognise that a debt based system will not work and cannot work the Third world poverty will worsen.
ANIMAL RIGHTS / VEGETARIANISM
by Barbara Ellen - The Observer People who’ve been informed of the dangers of meat, particularly the cheap processed variety, but who continue to wolf it down should be held accountable.
by Humane Society International/Europe – TRANSCEND Media Service HSI celebrates largest animal test reduction in history. Humane Society International/Europe is celebrating a change in European law on biocides, non-food pesticides, that will save tens of thousands of dogs, rabbits and rodents from painful and lethal chemical poisoning tests. Dogs, rabbits, rodents, birds and fish are all commonly used in biocides testing. The chemicals are injected into their blood, force-fed into their stomach and lungs, applied to their skin, or placed in their food and water. They can experience nausea, convulsions and death—all without pain relief.
BOOK REVIEW
by Siv O'Neall - ICH In his latest book “Mass Destruction – the Geopolitics of Hunger”, Jean Ziegler talks about the current state of the world and the neoliberal politics of starvation of the poor, which has led to a crisis situation amounting to calculated murder. What we are witnessing today is the worst hunger crisis in human history is. And it is all because of human greed, colossal mismanagement for profit.
IN OTHER LANGUAGES
by Fernando Romero/Amadeo Cabrera/ María José Saavedra – La Prensa Gráfica Presidente ordena al Ejército hacer una revisión de su propia interpretación de la masacre de hace más de 30 años. Aseguró que no se considerará “héroes” a militares violadores de derechos humanos.
SHORT VIDEOS
by The Real News Network – TRANSCEND Media Service The Occupy Movement has taken much of its inspiration from Spain’s “Outraged” Movement: what lessons does Spain have for Occupy now?
IN-DEPTH VIDEOS
by Global Research TV – TRANSCEND Media Service In this video, Fairewinds introduces additional analysis by Ian Goddard showing that the BEIR VII report underestimates the true cancer rates to young children living near Fukushima Daiichi. Looking at the scientific data presented by Mr. Goddard, Fairewinds has determined that at least one out of every 20 young girls (5%) living in an area where the radiological exposure is 20 millisieverts for five years will develop cancer in their lifetime.
JOKE OF THE WEEK
by TMS Editor Three guys were fishing in a lake one day, when an angel appeared in the boat.
